Ethan Frome Reflection

Despite reading, analyzing and even discussing Ethan Frome with others, I was never able to find any sort of meaning or lesson at the end of the book. To put the main characters in awful pain for an entire story, only for that pain to never be resolved or shown to have a purpose in educating the reader was perplexing to me. I’ve always been taught to seek out meanings and to learn from the stories I read, and the lack of a message in Ethan Frome made me feel as if there was no purpose in the story, and many critics have felt the same way.

Lionel Trilling, a well-regarded critic of the mid 1900’s, wrote an essay in 1956 called “A Morality of Inertia” which discussed the same troubling fact that I had discovered: Ethan Frome had no lesson to

teach, and Edith Wharton had made her characters suffer for no reason. Trilling states, “Whenever the characters in a story suffer, they do so at the behest of their author- the author is responsible for their suffering and must justify his cruelty by the seriousness of his moral intention.” In other words, putting the characters through pain without a valid reason for that pain is cruel and reflects badly on the morals of the author. He also notes that it “makes the reader participate in the cathartic pleasure that “derives from observing the pain of others.”” I think that his view on the morals of the situation are too extreme, and that writing a painful story with no point doesn’t make Edith Wharton a bad person, only a dull writer. She could have improved her story immensely by just giving it a purpose, but the ending was completely unsatisfying due to the lack of a meaning behind it. Aristotle taught that “literature must instruct,” and to have a story be any other way just feels like a waste of time.
Many people find problems in Wharton’s writing, and my main issue with it is that it lacks in purpose. It describes the lives of these people in an attempt to be realistic, but instead just describes an unsavory situation with even less savory people. The story revolves around mistakes that can’t be learned from and people who refuse to learn. The story of Ethan Frome has been unsatisfying for a plethora of people, including me.